Urban City: Providing Longevity to an Outdated Pack

It’s been over a year since Urban City Pack has released and has continued to be our bestseller. Luckily, we have not abandoned this pack. It’s been on our mind.. it haunts us as night.. it’s the crying baby screaming “update me!” and just needs a bit of TLC.

We have been gathering a ton of feedback and now have a gameplan on how to tackle a major update for this pack! There are lots of features we have been adding to our newer packs like Medieval Village and Industrial City that make Urban City look outdated.

Here’s a quick summary of some things we have been tackling the past few weeks to give this pack longevity:

common scale pass on all assets

material pass

interiors! our biggest request and we have delivered 🙂

hyper-modular and level modular pieces

transparent windows to see those beautiful interiors now

addition of new signage (street, store fronts

Having to universally scale everything up or down to match a third person character size caused quite a bit of issues for the buildings. Modular/hyper-modular pieces ended up being off the grid and not match anything to the power of 2. Luckily with Unreal’s vertex snapping we were able to find a middleground solution that made it work. Another thing we are trying to sort out is a transparency issue on the windows. Since the concrete is connected to the window texture, the glass part has to be see through but this causes the concrete window sill to be see through as well.

We have a laundry list of other things we plan to tackle that will be announced once they’re started. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the work we’ve been doing. Everything is still work in progress.

Screenshots

Doing a quick test to see transprancy on the windows and into the interiors. We think this really adds depth to the buildings and more life. One thing we did to the municipality building was add more geometry to the exterior giving it a bit more “pop”

Currently our windows are using an emissive texture to fake lighting in the windows. With proper window and interiors, you would be able to add an actual light inside and help sell the realism of your level.

Shot of our interior shells, we’re looking into finding a good way to add interior walls but haven’t figured out the best solution just yet.

Added a lot more corner pieces to make sure everything snaps together perfectly. We spent a lot of time cleaning up the hyper modular pieces. Once we scaled things properly, we noticed a lot of cracks on the walls and no corner pieces. We used a dirty trick to create them before by intersecting side walls together.

Inside of the hyper modular walls

Now that doors/interiors are enter-able, we had to thicken them and make sure they are two sided. We also modeled in a bit more detail such as the door handles since the player will walk right up to them now.

Some new materials we have been playing around with. Higher resolution walls, ceilings, ground textures for the buildings. Most of the textures in the current pack are 1024×1024 so we felt it wouldn’t hold up in the future.

Work in progress for some street signs being added to the pack. We felt like it’s a standard in most urban cities so it was a must add.

Details up close! We used a height map mixed with a metallic map to give it that reflective look. The finer bumpy details come from a height map

That’s all for now! All these fixes and new content will really add a breath of fresh air to this outdated pack. We will have more updates as this pack continues to be worked on.